Cry Meme a River: Humor in Transductive Spaces and the Need to Navigate It
In the Aug 2, 2017 episode of Hood Adjacent, comedian James Davis called for a postmortem on the Jordan Cry Meme, an image taken from Michael Jordan’s Hall of Fame induction speech, had become something more than a snapshot of a moment — it had become a ubiquitous image of sadness. Yet here’s the rub: the picture did not come from a moment of sadness but a moment of triumph. The moment, turned picture, turned meme has taken on a life of its own. In fact, it’s not enough to post the picture on someone’s face, you have to post it in a creative way.
The crux of his bit is that the meme has become a visual cliché, an image that once held relevance but now is as stale a digital image as raining like cats and dogs is a mental image. The Jordan meme is interesting on many facets: its reusability, its ability to rebrand Michael Jordan, and its lack of actual words. These characteristics make it easy for someone with photo shop and hard for digital consumers, making it both ubiquitous in pop culture and ubiquitous with unoriginality. Yet unoriginality does not equal unimportant.
The meme is a visual trope, an extension of Peter Ramus’ Renaissance tropes that somehow incorporates all four types: a metaphor for sadness, a metonymy substituting someone’s actual sad face, a synecdoche from Jordan’s Hall of Fame speech, and the irony that his tears are more gratefulness than sadness. Because it possesses a mélange of functions, it has been remarkably resilient at staying relevant even when losing its effectiveness.
In his article “The Cultural Effectiveness of Photo-Based Memes,” Limor Shifman points out that images like Jordan’s — reaction Photoshops [real time pictures placed out of context for humor purposes], hypersignification often take […] the form of highlighting the constructed, or even staged, nature of mediated realities” (344). His point is that the connotations associated with the photo create an extra layer of meaning and incongruity to the photo it’s attached to, causing at the least an ironic jab at the photo receiving the photo shop and making, at the most, a statement about the events in the photo. Shifman uses the ‘Tourist Guy’ photo as his example, a photo which turned out to be a hoax but nonetheless made its rounds as a reaction, with the tourist being photo shopped onto the Titanic among other places.
The life cycle of a meme reflects a rhetorical concept that’s becoming more complex or at least more far-reaching in the digital age — kairos, rhetorical timing as a means of effective communication. One cannot simply say or post or even do the right things but must say, post, or do them at the right time. In a world getting faster and smaller, a meme posted even a month after going viral may be too late if it’s made its internet rounds. It can make the one who posted it seem out of touch. Of course, like a car that starts new then goes out of style then becomes classic, re-posting a meme long enough after its life cycle has lived and died, can spark a resurgence. Both examples emphasize that humor hinges on timing, filling a dramatic pause with a well-placed verbal, visual, or verbal and visual quip.
James J. Brown explores this concept in a modern concept in “Louis C.K.’s ‘Weird Ethic’: Kairos and Rhetoric in the Network.” His article focuses more on C.K.’s use of snark, “a portmanteau of ‘snide’ and ‘remark’” on television and in standup, which one must deliver both quickly and poignantly but also makes one vulnerable to criticism (Brown Jr. par. 5). The vulnerability of C.K.’s (or any comic’s) live performances speak for themselves if one takes a moment to imagine how it would feel to deliver jokes to a room full of strangers. Brown’s focus on vulnerability is hard to apply to internet culture when one can send easily remarks without the consequences of a room full of silence or the frustrating news of dropping ratings. But when Brown points out that “[s]nark emerges as a defense mechanism against the vulnerability of a networked world” (par. 21) it ties into the role of a meme. An networked world in the internet sense, produces many more circumstances for snark than network television from sheer numbers of people who have the ability to respond and then re-respond.
This is both the strength and weakness of memes: their ease of creation and distribution make them weapons virtually anyone can throw. Yet when they land, they’re poignant. A large part of their effectiveness is luck — the right person retweets or even steals your meme at the right time and then the principles associated with kairos do the rest.
This rhetorical complexity of simplicity and knotty, of trivialness and poignancy possesses layers that a 1,000 word think piece doesn’t have (to be fair a think piece has its striated layers as well). On some level memes are a form of bullshit, defined by Harry G. Frankfurt as a form of communication meant to persuade or at the least get a reaction from an audience without concern for the truth. Liars want to hide the truth, bullshiters are unconcerned with it. Memes are designed to get a reaction. Most people aim to point at truth, but reaction is significant. Placement must work. For example, if the night of the election, someone placed a Jordan meme on Hillary Clinton, it would reflect her sadness. If it were placed on Trump’s face, it would reflect the suspicion that many people have — that Trump didn’t want to win the presidency. But if it were placed on the face of a Trump fan at a rally, it wouldn’t make sense.
It’s not enough to place them, you must place them accurately. Just like it’s not enough to decide in your mind that you’re going to joke around and be funny. You actually have to be funny — or at the least amusing. Memes are a form of bullshit as defined by Frankfurt, which isn’t difficult to learn. But it must be learned. Kairotic timing, accurate placement, logical appropriateness to situation are rhetorical principles that the Greeks have used and that we continue to refine.
Memes as Links, Memes as Tools
In a recent episode of the Bill Simmons podcast, Cycle Digital Media founder Jason Stein referred to memes as the digital form that’s the most uniting, allowing parents and children who listen to different music and absorb different content to communicate. The meme is simple for producers and accessible for consumers. Despite their protean nature, they are remarkably stable since one could see multiple versions of what are essentially the same joke. And they allow people to use allusions as cultural common places like Rogerian arguments that provide starting points with people from disparate perspectives. In his book The Social Media Reader, Michael Mandiberg explains that “[t]he meme of language is communication through speech. There are, however, multiple languages. Each individual language is a meme nested within a larger language meme. Additionally, within each language there are even more submemes: dialects, jargon, slang” (127). Not just protean, memes have the potential to be Russian nesting dolls where layers are unwrapped and reveal meanings hidden in foregrounded and juxtaposed images, words on the pictures, and the timing of their posting. Like a short poem, any aspect that can be analyzed takes on a heightened meaning.
Memes provide an element to Western language traditionally reserved for the pictographs of East Asian and Egyptian writing — the combined role of words and images, the manner in which the two work separately to create their own meaning but together to form a new meaning, a meaning not necessarily linear when combining the words and pictures. A gray area always exists between language and meaning but the gray area gets shadier when multiple meanings get added, especially if those meanings are semiotic.
All semiotics are tools: they can be used to build up or tear down. They can be used ironically to poke fun at, they can be used meta-ironically to poke fun at that which was getting poked fun at. It’s not enough to get the joke, for the joke to work, you must be in on it, too.
In her excellent article “Mapping Obama Hope”, digital Rhetoric scholar Laurie Gries discusses how images appear before us like buildings and books — as fixed, transitive things that have already been built and so we approach them with “conceptualized rhetorical processes ‘dominated by thought patterns and belief systems of literature culture” (336). Yet unlike her example of the Obama Hope meme, which was used as a semiotic political rallying cry or a cultural allusion that served as a rhetorical template, the Jordan cry face continues to shape how people view him, rewriting his athletic legacy in an odd way. For ex., someone born on Apr 16, 2003, Jordan’s last game, know him better as the Cry Meme guy, which is fine. We’re used to celebrities being one person to one generation and another to a younger generation.
But Jordan may be the first “historical figure” to be reinvented to different generations by the internet. Memes are fun to make and can be fun to read. Yet they can become a visual version of the “that’s what she said” joke, allowing someone who’s not clever to seem clever by waiting for the appropriate moment and then deliver a pre-made punchline. They get laughs or likes, the accolades of being funny without actually being funny.
Gries, in her book, Still Life with Rhetoric explains how a principle difference between a picture and an image is that “you can’t hang an image” (Mitchell qtd. in 9). By acknowledging this distinction, she is allowing for a subtle yet wide line between the two: an Obama Hope pic can be a framed picture, perhaps even the Michael Scott character from The Office could be framed in the Obama Hope format as a joke. But a Steve Jobs pic? A Che Guervo one? Would seem a bit much. Computer background, yes. Framed picture one paid money for? No.
This is largely harmless, but transported into a more complex arena, it has the ability to turn subtle verbal arguments into visual straw man arguments, and allow people to distribute easily faulty information while believing they are intelligent for having done so. We’ve always had the ability to do this but not at this speed and on this scale.
Digital Criticism — Theories for the Viral
The image above reflects why techniques that study words like in English classes, techniques that study pictures like in art history classes, and techniques that study distribution like in economics classes need to develop a language and heuristic for discussing and understanding what happens with memes, gifs, and other viral texts. In Still Life with Rhetoric Gries offers a solution, arguing that “new materialist perspectives for disclosing not only how things, especially images, flow but also how they become rhetorical with time and space” (xx). New materialism is effective because, like Freudian psychology or chaos theory, it takes into account more than just human intent. Factors that we only partially understand affect how we act and what we see.
This is nothing new — theology and other modes of thought have done the same for centuries, but new materialism deals with manmade devices, external events that we’ve created but, like a postmodern god, do not quite understand nor can fully control. New materialists view the texts we produce via the internet as Frankenstenian devices of [s]uch complexity [that it] cannot be investigated via methodologies that give too much weight to language’s ability to account for reality, agency, and ontology” (6). Because of this, we may also need to build on new materialism. Though it’s a discipline-intersecting criticism that explores the anthropological ways in which humans act in transductive spaces, other philosophical concepts like adaptive structuration theory, a theory discussed by Bradley Wiggins and G. Bret Bowers in their article “Memes as Genre,” which takes into account the agency of inanimate spaces and travel paths unknowingly created by digital heuristics.
Their research makes room for a “duality of structure” that builds on Gries’ new materialist ideas by acknowledging that humanity has ambivalence towards a “pseudo-biogenetic characteristic” that portable computers and omnipresent wi-fi can provide (1895 and 1892). The following chart from Wiggins and Bowers reflect the typical development (or lifespan?) of a meme:
Tying this back into Gries’ ideas on circulation studies and reassembling the social through a critical scholarly framework, we may must be ready to put many texts in similar categories and many other outliers into their own. For instance, the Jordan Cry Meme and the Obama Hope meme have similarities but have behaved differently virally. There are connections between the two that can be made, but the connections we would be tempted to make may not apply. For instance, both Jordan and Obama, are African American male baby boomers who came to prominence in Chicago and whose immense popularity extended beyond what even they could’ve expected. And yet if we plug these variables into a heuristic for critically analyzing memes, we may be mislead because the memes are related to but not because of these factors. A viral kairos may play just as much or even more of a role in the success of these memes, making our results viable but unstable, true but not truth.
Like subatomic particles that shift as soon as light is shed on them, memes move so much that slippery may not be an accurate enough metaphor. Rhetorical scholar Adam Banks talks about this on a larger scale when discussing the nature of the digital; it begs to be remixed. Just as pens and pencils are still useful but in some senses are outdated, the methods we use to examine digital rhetoric in general and memes in particular may need an update, grounded, of course, in principles that were their precursors but expanded beyond them: “digital culture seems to represent a new amalgamation between top-down mass-mediated genres and bottom-up mundane types of rhetorical actions” (Shifman 342). Essentially, internet genres bounce between sender and receiver so often so quickly that tracking them is hard enough let alone understanding the many iterations they go through take a criticism we have not quite developed yet.
The image above could not have been predicted yet makes perfect sense in hindsight. The key with the memetic is to be able to understand in real time and at some point anticipate the future, not with complete accuracy but like Vegas gamblers setting lines, with some competency.
Like any gambler will tell you, if someone is too good at predicting the future, he’s not predicting it — he’s controlling it. And like any comic will tell you, predicting what words and images can combine in the kairoitc moment and produce a pre-conceived response takes many false starts before knowing what will work, and even then it may not, thus adding another layer of complexity to the Jordan meme: its unexpected humorous effect despite not being all that funny.
In his book Memes in Digital Culture, Shifman comes to the “surprising conclusion [that] ‘bad’ texts make ‘good’ memes in contemporary participatory culture” (86). This speaks to the paradoxical nature of memes — in the digital word, everything seems to be moving towards the complex: videos, picture quality, sound quality. But memes have a rustic feel to them, the internet equivalent of a popular meat and three diner with thin forks and short order cooks. Part of their appeal is not just their low tech operating quality but their low tech look. The Jordan meme is at its best when it’s so obviously been photo shopped. If it looks too polished, it’s almost as if someone tried too hard to be funny.
Meme scholar Jonathan Zittrain points out that “[a] meme at its best exposes a truth about something, and in its versatility allows that truth to be captured and applied in new situations. So far, the most successful memes have been deployed by people without a megaphone against institutions that often dominate mainstream culture” (389). In other words, regardless of execution, a meme must point to truth. It can’t rely on shock value or nonsensical silliness. It has to reflect a logical bridge that tries to makes sense of the illogic of our day-to-day lives. This is where the meme as satire comes into play.
Despite their unpredictability, effective memes follow certain rules. That said, memes like any brand of humor may be effective in ways different from the way makers originally intended, like embarrassing viral videos where we as an audience are unsure if we’re laughing with or at the person in the video. Malcolm Gladwell addresses a version of this ambiguity in “The Saitre Paradox,” the tenth episode of his Revisionist History Podcast. Gladwell posits the question of whether satire and social justice actually work together or only seemingly work together while actually working against one another.
His argument is that people laugh at satire for different reasons. Even the people whom the joke is aimed at identify with the one doing the joking and not the butt. The reason is the small gray space where humor takes place has a surprisingly large space for interpretation, not just at what is and isn’t funny but who or what is being made fun of. Gladwell uses an example from The Stephen Colbert Show where he mockingly “attacks” progressive journalist Amy Goodman. Left-leaning audience members believe Colbert is making fun of right-leaning talk show hosts, but right-leaning audience members believe Colbert is not really joking. He’s saying what they believe and the humor makes sense. Both audience groups locate the irony but in different places.
So how does this tie into the Jordan meme? We must ask ourselves who is being made fun of with the meme? Is it Jordan? The person? The situation? All three or some combination of the three? Even the question of does it matter throws another crux into the mix: “Three attributes of the comic seem to account for the prominence of humor in this sample of memetic videos: playfulness, incongruity, and superiority” (Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture 79). These principles are nothing new in comedy, but when we cannot always know who began circulating the meme that slides into our news feed, we cannot fully know its purpose. Say we identify with the left. The following meme can be unclear if we don’t know the political sympathies of the person doing the posting.
Satirist and comedy writer Larry Wilmore challenged Gladwell on his Black on the Air podcast, disagreeing with Gladwell’s assertion as to the nature of the satirist’s job in society is to begin with. Gries quotes Callon and Latour, saying “picture [has the ability to] ‘bend […] space and time around itself’” (Still Life with Rhetoric 124). The web is bendable like a snake, not like a knee, and so are memes, and so is humor. This makes meme humor understandable on a cognitive level but challenging on an academic one. For instance, this is one of the most popular Jordan cry memes, but what does it mean?
Composing for the Future…
It is worth noting that James Davis has a meme contest at the end of each Hood Adjacent episode. Since the early days of radio, comedy has had a call and response element that made room for audience participation. This has not lessened over time. Memes are an excellent exercise in inventio and elocutio.
So perhaps memes can be more than just an object of study but a learning tool for student writing. Although composition professors have been using film and advertisements to teach the rhetoric of language through the rhetoric of images, the meme need not be forgotten because they are both a commercial for ideas and the ideas themselves, which is why being able to both deconstruct and construct them are important. This argument isn’t about Michael Jordan, it’s about the evolution (and sometimes even mutation) of ideas and moments. Students must be wary of these sources when synthesizing information because memes are mostly fun and, like advertisements, shape our thinking in ways we may not be aware.
Rhetorician Douglas Walls points out that “the digital has already disrupted how we do things in terms of theory, practice, and interpretation” (216). This is a good sign; it means we as scholars and educators are paying attention. But that’s not enough — students need to increase their literacies, but so do we as educators. Please don’t interpret this as false panic; I’m confident a grad student is writing his thesis on it as we speak. And somewhere on the other side of the country another grad student is writing her dissertation on it, ensuring that this protean piece of rhetoric does not slip under our pedagogical radar. Just as new materialism is a cross-discipline theory, we need to be cross-curricular compositions. Laurie Gries begins Still Life with Rhetoric with a epigraph from WJT Mitchell, saying “Pictures want equal rights with language, not to be turned into language” (1).
Could we be moving towards a return to Egyptian hieroglyphics? Probably not, but could an emoji-centered form of writing take shape where people will need to understand more than just a phonetic alphabet? It’s very possible. Pictures and words are apples and oranges. But perhaps we’re moving into an era where our children will be served a healthy diet of both apple and orange juice.
So what does this leave for Jordan? At some point the Jordan meme will run out of momentum or at the very least will stop being associated with Jordan the basketball player but some abstract idea of Jordan’s legacy, similar to Pop Warner football leagues have a connection to the legendary, turn of the century football coach in name only. Jordan is still active — he owns an NBA team, still produces his signature shoes, still shows up in commercials. But the meme is a part of him that has grown apart from him.
Perhaps to us who are exponentially less famous and less wealthy, this serves as a reminder that even in this world of faster, better, more modern, more digital that we our bodies, our lives, our legacies are as perishable as Shelley’s Ozymandias, and if we’re lucky, future generations can find a buried plaque with our names beside “trunkless legs of stone” in the midst of “lone and level sand.”